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Video editing on new Macbook air 2018
- Thread starter axeldtf
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I was thinking the same thing. It will have the hardware to decode and play however, when editing you might have to use proxy mode.
good luck with that. With a y-series processor and the always weak Intel integrated gpu, for about the same price you're much better off getting a 21.5 inch iMac with a dedicated video card and a real processor. Sure you'll be stuck at your desk when you edit, but the experience overall will be infinitely better.
I wouldn't say it's impossible, considering my 2013 MBA can kinda-sorta do 4k25p editing in Final Cut.
thanks for the advice.. hopefully it will at least be able to handle the light editing. I will put off the imac or some mac desktop for next year. Being a student at the moment i need something portable. thanks again folks for the replies.
I think for basic cutting, it’ll likely be fine. The main thing you care about there is playing back without dropping frames and smoothness of moving or scrubbing through the viewer or timeline. Since the CPU has QuickSync that will support 4K resolution, and at (I think) 60fps, that aspect should be pretty fluid, and the actual “software side” of the CPU shouldn’t be working too hard (again, for basic cutting). @joema2 could probably weigh in with a more detailed assessment...
I've edited small amounts of 4k H264 on my top-spec 2013 MacBook Air. It's not a speed demon but it can do limited amounts of single-cam material. I assume the 8th-generation CPU would be better, even though it's only a dual-core i5. The Kaby Lake version of Quick Sync definitely showed improved performance in the 2017 iMac vs the 2015.
Editing 4k H264 is difficult on any machine without proxies, even with Quick Sync. It partially depends on your expectations, whether single or multi-cam, and whether proxies are used. I usually use proxies even on my 10-core Vega64 iMac Pro, but most of my material is multi-cam.
This is for FCPX and Resolve, which both use Quick Sync or on the iMac Pro AMD's similar UVD/VCE hardware. Premiere only uses it for encoding (export) so can be very sluggish for 4k H264 playback.
In short,
1. any computer will struggle with 4k editing. More powerful is always better for video (more RAM, more storage, faster SSD, more throughput). Having said that, you can operate FCPX on MBA but it won't be a speed demon (See Point 1).
2. FCPX is optimized for mac and you should use proxies.
3. Exporting to media will take more time on MBA.
4. EGPU may have accelerate some tasks, but see Point 1 cause graphics is not the only bottleneck.
Your question is answered.
If you seriously in video, you have to buy a dedicated desktop machine.
Yeah, that might work. I do worry about using the dual-core, "lightweight" CPU for the bulk of your editing back home. Yes, some rendering and real-time display tasks are offloaded to the GPU, so an eGPU would help, but I think you'll be waiting for lengthy periods on other filters/effects/encoding that still require as much CPU as possible. As you are a student, you might not have a heavy enough editing workload to worry about that just yet, so an eGPU might be perfect.
Do you have a larger display that you'd use at home in tandem w/ the MBA+eGPU? If not, it occurs to me that the $700 you might drop on Apple's BMD eGPU could alternately go toward a 27" iMac as your home editing station. Even the base one @ $1800** would have a decent Radeon Pro 570 (similar to RX 570, I think?) and a quad-core CPU. If you figure out the eGPU "proceeds", then you're getting the CPU/RAM/HD and a 5K display for a "mere" $1100.
** = If you went this route, definitely change to 256GB SSD for $100 more, do NOT get the 1TB Fusion Drive— it is an insult to Fusion Drives (and customers) w/ only 24GB of flash/SSD.
And if you still wanted to go eGPU but weren't dead-set on the expensive Apple/BMD solution, I saw a good 9to5Mac review of the Razer eGPU box for $299...get your own Sapphire Pulse RX 580 for $250 or so and save ~$150.
Yeah, lots of options to consider. If you were thinking about adding a 4K display in addition to the eGPU, that's even further along the "cost path" to a 5K "Apple display" w/ an iMac attached.
